Ana Lily Amirpour directs Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi and Mozhan Marnò in this Iranian set vampire romance.

Had high expectations for this very well reviewed debut… and had enjoyed Amirpour’s gruesome follow up The Bad Batch. The monochrome look of it is amazing but it plays out like a very stretched out music video. There’s just not enough narrative to suspend all these gorgeous images and moments of disturbed longing. The style is wild, the substance lacking.

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Gerald Potterton directs Rodger Bumpass, Jackie Burroughs and John Candy in this adult fantasy animation anthology where warriors and future taxi drivers and horny robots and zombie bomber pilots are connected by a green glowing orb.

The stories vary in quality but the vibe is overpoweringly teenage boys Warhammer wank bank. You can almost smell the socks, deodorant and model glue. You get stacked women fucking droids. Stacked woman riding bugs into the sunset. Stacked women slicing up mutants with broadswords. Often in the nudie nude. Sex. Violence. Rock N Roll. Some knowing wit, equal amounts of misogyny. I found the juvenile extremeness of it all really alluring. My favourite episodes were “Harry Canyon”, “B-17” and “Den” in that order. They have their live action descendants in The Fifth Element, Overlord and Conan respectively. Silly, epic, dated, metal – watched as part of the Edinburgh Filmhouse’s Uncanny Valley Late Night series.

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Jon Wright directs Richard Coyle, Ruth Bradley and Bronagh Gallagher in this Irish sci-fi horror comedy where killer aliens swarm a remote community.

Shaun of the Dead go Bragh. Tremors with a drinking problem. Craggy Island Gremlins. Whatever the pitch was, it worked out. This is an undemanding one watcher with impressive creature FX and likeable performances. I enjoyed Ruth Bradley’s big city Garda a lot, she stands out among the stereotypes. The conceit that the monsters won’t kill the extremely drunk because of their dehydrating blood alcohol opens things up solidly. Follows the rule book slavishly, delivers the goods with surprising conviction.

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Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer directs Alex Essoe, Amanda Fuller and Noah Segan in this Hollywood horror where a wannabe toys with the offer to submit to a demonic casting couch for a breakthrough role.

Strong on nervy paranoid atmosphere but lurches into some awkward directions – there’s a gore sequence that feels like it is there for the trailer, not the narrative. Essoe is good as our frustrated lead, and there’s some strong body shock imagery but you can’t help but keep thinking you are watching a poor man’s Mullholland Dr.

5

David Ayer directs Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña and David Harbour in this found footage buddy cop movie where two patrol officers police a hellish district.

A modern update on The New Centurions full of great and horrific moments. The “camera in story” conceit doesn’t work one itty bit and the introduction of some BIG BAD cartel villainy comes straight outta a comic book. To make up for these faults you have Gyllenhaal and Peña’s smoking camaraderie and Anna Kendrick dancing to the Birdie Song… Yo!

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Robert Aldrich directs Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster and Caesar Romero in this action western where a struggling plantation owner and a gregarious bandit become mercenaries for the Mexican emperor.

A cowboy action extravaganza with the unusual twist that the white hat and the black hat become friends. Vera Cruz is a progenitor of both the spaghetti western and the buddy movie. This is an electric entertainment, powered by the fact we know our stars are going to have revert back to their natures and face off over the gold, girls and freedom fighters floating around the plot. The ending is thrilling and unpredictable. Lancaster is all teeth and smiling menace in one of his best early roles.

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Bill Forsyth directs Robert Buchanan, Billy Greenlees and John Gordon Sinclair in this crime comedy where a group of unemployed Glasgow lads plot to steal a warehouse full of stainless steel sinks.

A quirky little low budget number littered with nice moments but a bit too thin and amateurish to hold your attention for its entire feature length. The running joke about the boy who really gets into impersonating a cleaning lady for the sake of the score has aged the best, surprisingly.

5

Abbi Kiarostami directs Behzad Dorani, Farzad Sohrabi and Noghre Asadi in this Iranian arthouse drama about an engineer stranded in a remote village waiting for an elder to die while he struggles to acquire milk and phone signal.

Kiarostami sure loves middle aged men driving around outskirts of towns meeting people and considering their mortality! I’m not sure I do quite so much but this was watchable.

6

Richard Lowenstien directs Michael Hutchence, Kylie Minogue and Paula Yates in this found footage documentary following the life, lovers and decline of the INXS frontman.

INXS was my very much one of my sister’s bands but I have nostalgia for their bangers… of which they have enough to earn their place in pop history. This documentary by a friend of the subject is strange in that rather than being a celebration as intended it feels a collection of backhanded compliments focussing on the failures, tragedies and misfires rather than the hits. While it tries to paint a positive portrait of Hutchence and justify some of his worst behaviour and poor reputation, it unwittingly only proves the case for his diminished standing. Worst yet the hits are skipped over like distractions. Only very candid footage of an incognito romantic interlude with Kylie in the Orient has the right mixture of intimacy, heat and glamour that these muso documentaries need to fascinate us and humanise their subjects.

5

Rick Rosenthal directs Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance and Dick Warlock in this direct continuation of Halloween… will a hospitalised Laurie Strode survive until dawn with the invincible Micheal Myers still on the hunt?

As with Rocky II, the producers / writers (Carpenter and Debra Hill) weren’t overly confident the returning audience would remember where the principals were left in 1978, so cheaply just rerun the final five minutes again at the top. There are tweaks… that clumsy peek at Michael’s face when he adjusts his mask is trimmed out and the lawn he falls down on and disappears from is now a verdant green rather than patchy late October soil. Then we get an hour of idling -new characters we don’t care about being introduced and old survivors having their screentime diminished to a minimum of shooting days. Jamie Lee doesn’t wake up until the final act, by which time Myers has offed a group of nobody nurses and candy stripers with seemingly anything but his trademark big knife. He’s evolving, bless his soul. It is a cheap-ish cash-in sequel with all the compromises and reheating such a production entails. But the final 20 minutes when Laurie Strode is back in final girl mode are pretty effective and explosive. Pudding worth waiting for. There’s also some garbled guff about pagan evil and hidden family histories that the series latched on to but has never really made work… For a stock slasher sequel, I kinda appreciate its unashamed utilitarianism. Roll on Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, a true underrated gem.

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